


Only that day dawns to which we are awake

by Anatolius



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Age Swap, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mertoria, Merturia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:21:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25379065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anatolius/pseuds/Anatolius
Summary: After more than one thousand years, Merlin eventually sees what aged Artoria looks like.a completed story
Relationships: Merlin | Caster/Artoria Pendragon | Saber
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28





	Only that day dawns to which we are awake

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [他们相遇时已非黎明](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21366229) by [KateLaurant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KateLaurant/pseuds/KateLaurant). 



> As English is not my first language, there could be some grammatical errors in this translation. Please let me know if you have any suggestion. Thanks for reading!

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

\--- Henry Thoreau, _Walden_

It’s said that as you grow old, your journey of life will lead from dawn into sunset.

Nearly seventy now, Artoria Pendragon thinks she is old enough. Her eyes are not dim yet, but her memory has started failing. Like most of the elderly, she can easily recall things that have been decades old, but has difficulty in remembering the present, which usually leaves only vague flashes in her memory. She frequently forgets to pay her utility bills or take medicine on time. People living nearby respect her, but none have enough courage to talk to her.

No doubt her bad temper is to blame. Artoria was a beauty once, but never bloomed for any man. She devoted half of her lifetime to serving in Special Forces, and her only friends were smoke of eruption, tin cans, blood, and noise of gunfire.

She survived dozens of battles and dangerous missions, and succeeded to keep her arms and legs intact after all of that. Some old wounds, however, were left on her body, punctually aching on every rainy day. Moreover, something always haunts on her, like a ghost from the past.

 _You’ve been past your prime_. She often says to herself. _You are just a lonely, old woman now_. The only consolation is that there’s no robber stupid enough to target her, thanks to the signs of a former soldier in her look.

 _But that does not help in making tea_. Artoria thinks, pouring all the frighteningly thick liquid into the sink---actually only half of it, as the other half is spilled on the kitchen counter by her shaky hands. Hands able to assemble a gun in twenty seconds years ago; hands too inert to make a cup of tea now.

She is irritably leaving the kitchen to get a cloth when she hears someone turning the key in the lock. Artoria stops alertly, but in a second she remembers what it is: one of the few things that she can hardly forget these days.

“Sorry to be late, madam. I was busy with school activities.” The sound of a young man comes from the open door, which pauses as if he is looking for her. “Heavens, are you cooking?”

Artoria breathes a sigh of relief. She gives up cleaning the mess, and walks out of the kitchen. She sees a young man with long hair hanging his coat on the clothes tree, a heavy shopping bag in his hand.

“I meant to make tea.” She confesses.

The young man sighs with resignation.

“Leave it to me.” He says gently, indicating that she could just sit back into the soft armchair in the living room.

Artoria obeys, and smiles at the sounds of the young man moving around in the kitchen.

Merlin looks no more than thirty, always well-dressed in light-coloured clothes. He has the face of a dandy, and his long hair just strengthens such an impression. One can hardly find a second person like him in the unprepossessing countryside of Cornwall. He doesn’t seem to belong here, or rather, belong to anywhere he goes.

When they first met, Artoria found Merlin's claim to be a teacher of the middle school in the town quite unbelievable, for she could hardly imagine him dealing with a group of noisy children, but later she got used to it.

A few moments later, Merlin reappears with a tray. “Your tea is ready.” He bends to pour the tea into her cup. Beside is a milk pot. “Be careful. It’s hot.”

“I want some cheesecake.” She requests when trying hard to remember the last time she ate it. “Did I eat up the cake the day before yesterday?”

The young man laughs.

“It’s three days ago, so I bought some for you on the way here.” He says, and Artoria nods with relief, knowing that he always thinks of everything.

The young man cuts her a little piece of cake, and puts it into the plate. He often brings her some dessert, but never indulges her with too much, despite her outstanding stomach for her age.

Artoria puts some milk to the tea, and sips it, feeling the warmth permeating every corner of her old frame. She finds herself gazing at the young man taking care of her. This sight, though always pleasant, provokes surges of nostalgia that she can’t explain.

+++

Several months ago---her failing memory didn’t allow her to remember the exact time---Merlin Ambrosius jumped into her life.

She uses ‘jumped into’ because he really appeared from nowhere. He was like a drop of bright ink falling into the dreary environment, and then naturally absorbed by her life.

It was an ordinary afternoon when Merlin appeared in her life with an apple pie and a bunch of flowers. She opened the door with a gloomy face, ready to shoo away a cheeky salesman or a naughty boy playing tricks along the street. However, what she saw was a strange, smiling face and a bouquet.

Artoria looked suspiciously at the young man. He seemed to get stunned at the sight of her, but moments later the smile returned to his face.

“Good afternoon, madam.” He said as he walked in.

For an unknown reason, she found herself giving way to the strange man to let him pass. He walked through the hallway naturally like returning home. After a quick glance around, he put the bundle of flowers into an empty vase on the windowsill, and then took something out of a paper bag and placed it on the table. She saw it was a nicely roasted apple pie.

That done, the young man with long hair turned to her and smiled.

“Sorry for this sudden visit, madam. I’m Merlin, your new neighbour. I have just moved to the house next to yours.”

The way he smiled and talked was familiar, though Artoria was sure she had never met this man before.

“I’m Artoria Pendragon.” She said simply. Her old-fashioned self refused to call the man she just met by his first name. “Can I know your full……”

“Merlin Ambrosius.” The young man seemed a little disappointed, but he didn’t insist on her calling him Merlin.

“Welcome to Cornwall, Mr. Ambrosius.” She was relieved by his attitude. “It’s nice of you to come to see me, but I'm afraid you have to leave. I have a lot of work to do.”

“I didn’t know you're so busy---”

“Now you know it.” She said firmly, and opened the door for him.

Mr. Ambrosius shrugged and turned to leave. Before Artoria closed the door, he looked back and smiled at her again, which gave her a stronger feeling of familiarity. She shook her head, and hoped she could easily shrug off this strange young man.

Nevertheless, the apple pie tasted good.

+++

At the tenth or eleventh visit of Mr. Ambrosius, however, Artoria let him enter the hallway again.

Before she gave in, Mr. Ambrosius sedulously visited her with flowers and food in hands, and everything he brought just “happened to be” her favourite, though she hated to admit it. Gradually they talked longer, and at last she invited him in.

“You always like the food I bring, right?” After he finally got the right to sit on her sofa, Mr. Ambrosius asked her suddenly.

She got amused by his question. Somehow Mr. Ambrosius often talked as if he was an old friend that met her again after a long separation. Once, he went too far, and the words sounded strange even to himself, so he tried to put her off with a poor excuse and a smile---the smile lighted up a corner of her clouded, failing memory, and she thought maybe they really had met before, sometime, somewhere.

A month later, she started to call Mr. Ambrosius by his first name.

Artoria spent much time reflecting on why Merlin came to see a morose old woman again and again. At first, she suspected he was a professional criminal scamming pensioners out of their retirement money, but she was not well off, and had long been disconnected from her relatives. Besides, every week she checked receipts and bills left by Merlin to see whether he was stealing her deposit, but she found nothing.

By and By, she gave up the effort, thinking maybe she happened to look like a lost loved one of his.

It was hard, if not impossible, to win her trust. She suffered from PTSD for many years, and psychiatric care didn’t provide any relief. When Artoria first retired, everytime she opened a pop-top can she had to constrain herself from throwing it far away, and such a thing even seemed mild compared with her overreaction to flying baseballs and plastic bags on the road.

Besides, she tried hard to adapt herself to the soft bed and struggled over the whole night for sleep. She couldn’t settle into the environment and looked at everyone suspiciously. She spent countless time fighting against the impulse to injure others and herself. In addition to that, she had nightmares.

Those nightmares were sharp and clear, where she often found herself curling up in a trench, dust and blood in her mouth. She crammed the rifle hastily. A few steps away were explosions, cries, shrapnel, and bodies of her comrades. A stray bullet hit her. She squeezed the trigger, and shot a man’s head.

Those dreams, however, were at least explicable.

Sometimes she dreamed more. The blood-red sky hung over a medieval battlefield. Tattered flags were flying in a burning city. The earth trembled, moaned, as the knights galloped forward.

\---And that’s her deepest nightmare, which always creeped back in the middle of nights. She could neither explain them, nor control them.

As she aged, she dreamed less and less about her service in Special Forces, but the other nightmare still haunted on her. However, after she met Merlin, the nightmare miraculously started to fade away.

+++

One day, Merlin repaired a locker that she had been unable to open in the attic. They found an old photo album in the locker, lying quietly on the compartment. The photos, which were taken when she first joined the squad, had turned yellow, but luckily the faces were still discernible.

On the first page was a group photo, in which most of the people had been killed in battles, and only a few survived with her. However, not all of the survivors could be called the lucky ones. Some reunited with their families and lived a happy life, but some lived alone, and were completely down in the world.

She saw Merlin stared down into the third row of people in the photograph, and was silent for a while. Artoria leaned to see the photo, and found the one that drew his attention was a blonde girl.

Like the others in this picture, the girl was in an army uniform, hair precisely coiled at the back of her head, and her delicate face wore a look of solemnity. Artoria really wondered how he spotted her in no more than a glance.

“You’re here.” Merlin murmured. His finger caressed the photograph. Artoria couldn’t tell who he was talking to, the girl in the picture or the old woman in reality.

“You have an eye.” She said. “I was much prettier then.”

He was silent again for a long time before he came out of the trance and smiled in a teasing manner as he always did. “I bet you had a dozen of admirers at that time.”

“The admirers, if any, all gave up after several weeks.” Artoria laughed. “Because they found themselves no match for me, in fighting.”

Merlin laughed with her. He murmured something like “I should have guessed”. They turned a few pages of the album. Some photographs seemed to have been corroded with moisture, and the people in them were blurred.

One photo was less damaged, where dim shapes of four girls could be recognized. Two of them were taller and older. Artoria remembered it was taken by Igraine on her tenth birthday. 

“The other three are my sisters,” Artoria explained. “half-blooded though. They were brought by Mom when she got married with Dad. Morgan saw me off when I joined the army, but after that we were connected only by Christmas cards. After Mom passed away the Christmas cards stopped. We have been out of touch for so many years that I’m not sure if they are still alive.”

Merlin shook his head.

“You’re not good at keeping in touch with others, right?” He asked, but there was no doubt in his voice.

For an instant, there was an urge for Artoria to tell him everything about the PTSD that haunted her for decades, her nightmares, and her terrible life. The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she finally bit them back, thinking that would be too stupid.

Seeing Merlin still absorbed in the album, she changed a topic.

“You’re not thinking it’s too bad that I spent half of my life shooting others’ heads, right?” She asked, because some people told her something similar already.

“I don’t know. It sounds like your style.” _See, he’s saying weird things again._ “And you look fine just the way you are.”

She raised an eyebrow and laughed at herself, which deepened the creases around her eyes.

“What way? Face covered with wrinkles, left hand too shaky to hold anything on rainy days, and one foot in the grave?”

Merlin suddenly closed the album, and gazed into her eyes. Then Artoria had an inkling about where his weird feeling came from. He looked so young, but something in his air made him seem much older than her---sometimes he talked as if he had lived for centuries.

“Just the way you grow old.” He said.

They were both silent for a while, and then Merlin turned his head as if to hide something.

“I mean, at least you survived, luckily. Most of the young men that went off to the war never came back.”

“I thought for many years that it might’ve been better had I died there.” She said, and added at the sight of his stiffened back. “I’ve seen it differently. After all, I’m already old and near to death, so I no longer need to pray for that.”

She immediately regretted having said this. She’s not good at consoling others, and they didn’t go on the topic.

+++

When Artoria is alone, she often replays the first half of the life in her mind, thinking about what she’s done, who she’s hurt, and how the haunting nightmares has changed her life.

When she announced to join the army, Uther and Igraine were both shocked, and kept speculating what inspired her to make that decision: immaturity, overconfidence, stunning propaganda, or just the sense of mission and justice. However, the true reason is always consigned to herself.

She went to war, only because the dreams were calling her, and she believed there must be an explanation for them.

On sunny afternoons, she often tells stories to Merlin as a thank you to the warm tea and delicious biscuits he brings. She patiently talks about the events in her life, the experiences that were imprinted on her memory. Many of them have never been told to her psychiatrist, and Artoria has never thought she needs someone to listen to them, either.

When she ran on the battlefields, she felt nowhere in this world could she find such peace. When she breathed the smell of gunpowder and dried blood, she had never felt so close to her belief. She saw her comrades fell in war, and more enemies fell to her gun. Everything seemed so familiar that only when living with weapons, fights and deaths could she feel the sense of belonging.

“Before I joined the army, the interviewer told me I would be a good soldier.” She says, remembering how the interviewers threw tricky questions to recruits in a cruel tone and tried to see if they would quail by intimidation.

“At that time, they said: ’You don’t expect someone would think about your feelings now, right? You will soon be a part of those who walk on the brink of death, and sometimes you must go to extremes in case the worst happens.’”

“They also asked me whether I was ready to go to extremes when necessary, like, shooting a mob’s head even if his child was close by.”

“That sounds quite terrible.” Merlin says, and breaks off a bit of rusk for her. “What was your reply?”

Artoria sighs.

“I said 'of course, sir, as long as I get the order.'" She pauses. " Later the interviewer said I was the calmest person he'd ever met to answer the question, so he believed I would be a good soldier.”

Merlin stops what he's doing, and seems absorbed in thoughts for a while.

“I have no doubt about it,” He says, “but you’re more than a soldier, madam.”

 _But I doubt it_. Artoria thinks, and bites back the words when she sees Merlin turns to change the channel of the radio.

Artoria believes she was once a good soldier, but other than that she achieved very little success.

She retired from service and then went back to battlefields for countless times, until her age no longer allowed her to serve. She tried to return to a normal way of life, but this effort was of no avail, just as she had never managed to maintain a long-term relationship with anyone. She always wandered away from crowds, looking at them in the way a person on the bank looks at running water.

When she was 23 years old, Uther became gravely ill and was hospitalized. Igraine wrote to Artoria, asking her to pay an overdue visit to Uther.

5 days after she received the letter, Artoria opened it.

“Of course, Mom. I'm going home in a few days.” She wrote back.

And she didn’t make it.

Several days passed, and Artoria almost forgot that promise. Her family didn’t write any new letter to her, either. She thought maybe Uther had recovered. Then, one day Morgan made a direct call to her team.

“Dad passed away.” Mixed with the buzzing noise, Morgan’s voice sounded distant and vague.

Artoria felt blank for a moment. The image of Uther helping her repair a wooden soldier long ago flashed into her mind.

“When did it happen?” She asked.

“Three days ago. The funeral will be held next week.” Morgan said in a plain tone. “We will see you at that time, right?”

She fell silent.

“Wart?*”

“……I’m going to ask for leave.” She frowned at the nickname, “Tell Mom I’m sorry to upset her.”

Most of the time, Artoria thought her pain partly came from the elusive nightmares, and partly from the fact that she survived.

She had to admit it. From a certain point on, she started to fight towards death. She was ready to die for her country, and everything would be much easier for her if that came true, but she survived.

She had a lover, once. When Artoria was 30 or so, she met a medical clerk at the VA medical center, and later he became her boyfriend. They could meet each other only in rare holidays every year, so once she planned to retire, she moved to live together with him.

When she checked in at the front desk of his apartment, one of the staff said “thank you for your service” with respect. The true feelings in the words brought a bang of guilt to her. _I didn’t do anything other than killing._ She thought.

Those days were more than hard and torturous for both of them. Every night before she went to sleep, she would lock the door and hide a dagger under her pillow. She knew she was too sensitive to the surrounding environment, and often overacted to a minor threat, but she just couldn’t control it.

“I'm tired.” Her boyfriend said when he bailed her out for the sixth time---she had almost beat two stupid thieves to death. It wasn’t the first time she did it, and wouldn't be the last time.

She felt nothing but relaxation to hear that.

“Well, I think it’s time to say goodbye.” No sorrow, no regret, she replied in pure relief because she no longer had to involve other people into her mess.

About a month later, she went back to the front line.

At the age of 50, she eventually retired, going back to homeland with a battle-scarred body and soul. However, her symptoms took a turn for the worse rather than better.

Department of Veterans Affairs decided that she should have drug therapy. After a long time of treatment, her anxiety and manic depression gradually receded, but her doctor found a new problem.

“Some of your symptoms were not caused by PTSD.” The doctor said, “Sometimes you seem to think you belong to somewhere else. You refuse to offer more details, so I can't make any further judgement.”

She allowed herself a wry smile.

“I know.” She replied.

+++

Sometimes Artoria can’t help wondering, _why do you still bother trying to visit me?_

However, Merlin does bring some changes to her life. She still has weird dreams, but less and less about the battlefields and hills of corpses. She starts to dream about a vast golden field where a white castle stands, sunshine pouring over the pillars into a corridor.

One day, she wakes to the dawn, and remembers EVERYTHING.

She does not get scared or think herself going crazy. Though every part of the regained memories seems preposterous, she quietly accepts them.

Artoria spends the whole morning connecting the dots of her two lives. She thinks about the weird things Merlin has said, his meaningful looks and expressions, which make somewhere deep in her heart stung. _Why did you come so late_ , she thinks it over and over.

In the afternoon, Merlin does not show up on time. Artoria waits for him in the armchair, listening to the radio, which almost lulls her into a light doze. When the twilight is falling, she starts to doubt maybe Merlin knows the exact time when her memories come back, and he is such an asshole that he decides not to show up again. In a fit of pique she makes two pots of extremely terrible black tea, and then hears the ring of the doorbell.

Artoria opens the door, and sees Merlin standing there. His white hair glitters under street lights, like fallen snow over his body.

For a moment she is at a loss what to do next. To tell him she has remembered the past life, to complain he found her so late, or to directly seize him by the collar and ask what all this is about?

However, when Artoria looks into his eyes, she instantly understands that he has known everything.

“You’re late.” At last she murmurs, “I’m still not good at making tea.”

Merlin looks down on her, eyes moistened by the old memories. After a while, a gentle smile lifts the edges of his mouth. When he speaks again his voice is bright and clear, like the dawn light to which she was awake.

“Sorry to be late, Artoria.” He says in the way he did to a girl more than one thousand years ago. “I’ll make tea for you.”

—FIN—

*Wart is the nickname of Athur in _Once and Future King_


End file.
